The Hampstead novel aka domestic novels, especially as written to & by women

Over the past year and one half (that long), we’ve had a reiteration of themes in several threads on WomenWritersthroughtheAges@yahoo.com, which I’ve wanted to write about as directly relevant to why women need to continue reading Austen as one of the respectable inventors of the women’s domestic novel: to read her is to arm yourself with some protection, a norm or ideal of self-respecting intelligence which might see you through the worst of heterosexual courtships (and that’s saying something); as an outspoken endorser of “middle brow” novels adhering to realistic conventions (verisimilitude is the term in some circles), and most recently as one of the first practitioners of what was referred to derisorily as “the novel of adultery in Hampstead,” for short, the Hampstead novel (how? adultery? well, you have to understand they don’t have to happen in Hampstead nor include adultery).

I’m moved finally to write about the these briefly as last week in the New York Times (no less) we were told (or it was implied) that there is no such thing as women writing primarily for other women: Cheryl Strayed would like to erase what’s overtly written this way as such domestic themed novels are denigrated by men: she has discovered and writes against the double standard for evaluating novels by women as contrasted to novels by men.

Short-listed — an almost Booker Prize

As chance would have it 4 days before (Cheryl’s piece appeared on May 12th), D. J. Taylor (May 8th) wrote about four of such domestic novels, a kind he once (notice he no longer does this kind of thing) wrote himself: “Reprinting the mid-list,” for TLS, pp 19-20. TLS puts it behind a wall, so not online for us all. Taylor has now turned to neo-Victorian Thackerayan fiction (redolent of Dickens too). Taylor says these caricatured novels used regularly to be made fun of (I suspect as woman’s novels), but they are precisely the novels that are often brought back and re-issued. He seems to imply some of these are the best novels of the 20th century; as all four of his choices are by men (a common characteristic found in men’s critical prose for centuries), I’ll confirm that by citing the Australian Christian Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children (far from Hampstead and about an enforced abortion) and Rosamund Lehman’s The Echoing Grove (excruciatingly castigated by Q.D. Leavis for her Dusty Answers), turned into a misogynistic movie alas; Lehman’s The Weather in the Streets is the first middle brow novel where a woman has an abortion (not in the streets, so she can reads Pride and Prejudice before and after).

I have been thinking about how the outstanding Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel fits precisely (neatly) into the century-long category discussed in Diane Wallace’s The Women’s Historical Novel, British Women’s writing, 1900-2000 because in her historical fiction Mantel turns to disguise (remember Woolf’s idea that women are still veiled) by choosing as narrator, a male, Thomas Cromwell, hitherto or since Bolt, everyone’s favorite ruthless thug (as enacted by Leo McKern in the unforgettable A Man for All Seasons with Paul Scofield and Wendy Hiller). The stealth central figure is of course Anne Boleyn. Further women’s genres include a subset of detective and recently bloody murder thrillers, female gothics (see Anne Williams) ghost stories (which Mantel indulges in too, as in her Black Book). This desire to deny that women write for other women, the way men write for other men, that they may take into account other genders, but that is their prime audience does not need Nancy Miller’s explanation in her Subject to Change: The Poetics of Gender. Like other human beings, women write out of their own experience and it is heavily shaped by their gender.

What I feel compelled to assert is women’s domestic themes novels (Hampstead) are superior to men’s gargantuan wide-ranging and violent ones. Men write Hampstead novels (from Samuel Richardson to Henry James to Ian McEwan) the way women do some men’s genres (science fiction, bloody murders, the picaro novel turned vast). Women’s novels are popular, widely read as women buy far more novels and read far more of these than men (men having been influenced by the stereotypical fear of being a “reading boy” feel justified if they can tell themselves what they are reading is factual, objective). More importantly, it’s a way of women forging connections with one another across space and time, a way of bypassing isolation and censorship.

While typical covers (as above) show men in interiors,

occasionally some hired illustrator is encouraged to put a woman there.

I’ve long disliked George Eliot’s “Silly Lady Novelists” because it’s ceaselessly quoted as her statement on women’s fiction and been used to condemn such. But she wrote an essay in which she discussed the origin of women’s novels in the letters, memoirs and conversation of French women writers of the long 18th century (Women of France: Madame de Sable). This is an important strongly feminist essay on the value of women’s conversation and private lives as central to their achievement, what they see, what they know, overlooked partly because of the title: Women in France: Madame de Sable: “In France alone woman has had a vital influence on the development of literature; in France alone the mind of woman has passed like an electric current through the language”. Perhaps too what she has to say is not liked by feminists sheerly out for power. I just wish someone would write an essay on silly male novelists, on the junk genres males often write in, and the absurdities of their action-adventure stories and films, and sensitive male pride and egoism (D. H. Lawrence comes to mind), and transparent fatuity of their salivating over their heroine’s body parts (Naipaul comes to mind), or pornography disguised as irony (Nabokov).

I often like Virago covers best

The earliest threads first emerged from a discussion of the fiction of Georgiana Spencer (The Sylph), the anonymous Emma, and Sophia Briscoe’s Miss Melmoth, Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy, all of which ended unfortunately when we tried Austen’s Emma: somehow Eliza Haywood came up as an alternative to what we might call the 18th century Hampstead novel in its earliest stages, in my view paradoxically (among feminist women scholars of the long 18th century) a ludicrously over-rated women writer because she is said to show women’s sexuality frankly: a fair reading of Haywood’s pre-didactic fiction before the mid-century Betsy Thoughtless turns up voyeuristic prurience: the equivalent of the once popular teenage magazine, True Story. Alongside her the scandal-writer, Delaviere Manley, Haywood writes on a crude level of Elizabethan “God’s Vengeance” stories; for me some level of stylistic beauty is required, and is in fact one of the pleasure the Hampstead novel characteristically offered. I’ve been told she speaks out for women but find her unreadable, sycophantic to the powerful, and exploitative of her reader’s appetites with little enlightenment about these. This earlier thread was long and meandered (I can’t begin to do justice to it here — we also discussed a sub-genre of women’s life-writing in the 18th century, “Under the Sign of Angellica”). It can be found on the Yahoo listserv and a few of my blogs (search for Richardson, Spencer, Emma, Haywood). Also on my Under the Sign of Sylvia blog on LiveJournal. Their burden was whether the predecessors or originators of the Hampstead novel (from Clarissa to Betsy Thoughtless, to Burney and Austen, to 19th century women writers onto Virago authors) erase women’s sexuality; I argued at their finest, they present sexual awakening and experience as women know it, in terms that enable them to make sense of it and sometimes cope.

An illustration from the Land of the Inheritance by Catherine Tobin (1863), “Incident in the Desert” — you would not want to show a woman traveling alone with servants or guides …

Tonight my purpose is simply to assert the women’s novel exists, it is important to and for women, and a variety of permutations exist from the Hampstead novel to women’s historical fiction, to the types outlined by Diane Philips (n her archealogy of women’s experience, to gothics, to girls’ books. Funnily enough Sayred’s own Wild fits right onto the genre of women’s travel writing (discussed in the same TLS issue as Taylor’s column, Jane Freeman’s review of Penelope Tuson’s Western Women Travelling East, 1716-1916, May 8, 2015, p 21): it descends from Sophie Cottin’s Elisabeth, a very long walk through Siberia, parodied by Austen’s in her late Plan of a Novel.

A typical modern cover is a drawing of a woman’s things — for Mary Wesley’s Jumping the Queue

7 Responses

“Although women don’t necessarily write only for women readers, I agree that women do tend to have a different way of writing. That’s where the bias emerges. I think what Strayed is getting at is that things have not changed as much as we like to believe. With the backlash against women, attitudes have regressed and this is what younger women, like Strayed, are coming up against. While women may buy more books than men, it is also true that they buy more books written by men than by women.

Strayed does refer to a whole slew of studies in her opening paragraph, so she not making this up. In fact, the references to studies comprises about half of her short piece.

In terms of feminism today, just think of the sad case of the early closing of Wasserstein’s play.

The question Strayed is responding to is important – is there a double standard for judging domestic themes in fiction? Well, she is saying there is, and I agree.

Even Harold Bloom’s new book on the twelve best American writers only includes one woman, Emily Dickenson. Bloom, whether we like him or not, is still tremendously influential. The patriarchy still exists. Other recent studies of writers are also biased in this way; some have been noted on this list. The reality is that men and male writers are still valued more highly than women. I think women have been seriously undermined in recent years and that male writers have benefited, allowing them to reclaim their position of privilege.

Think too of Game of Thrones, a good example of popular culture that shows we are regressing. This is not ISIS taking us back to the middle ages, it’s western culture. Something is deeply amiss.”

I could quote a whole slew of authorities to the effect that women and men write in gendered ways. It’s Strayed writing of how she does not like the denigration of women and one way she thinks she can stop this is to deny that women write a certain kind of (inferior fiction) for other women. I maintain many women do write primarily for other women, with expectations of their readership as primarily women and are talking to them; just like most maybe all men write primarily for men, with hopes of women readers, but not caring except that it swells the numbers and makes their vision more “universal” as they might see it.

It bothered me to see it denied because it’s an erasure of an area of life important to many women — including myself. It reminded me of other denials and veilings. Of how in effect Mantel writes in disguise — more in _Wolf Hall_ than _Bring Up the Bodies_.

Of course there’s a double standard. And almost every day I could open a mainstream publication and see respected men talking of some genre and its recent items and not one be a woman. Rowling is now a famous case of hiding her gender so her fantasy boys’ school stories would sell to boys Stayed’s essay will do nothing to stop that — only hurt women writers and readers who do come out honestly by denying, erasing, feeling in effect ashamed. She wants her book, Wild, not to be seen as part of women’s genres but it is. It goes right back to the long walk to prove or get something — you see it in travel books but also fictions.

I agree that Game of Thrones is a deeply disturbing TV show and books. What was most disturbing were some of the replies to s blog, where a woman denies the case was rape _and therefore says what happened was okay, acceptable_!.

There’s an underlying deep amorality thrust into violence in this series apparently and women are led to say this is fine: I see this as part of movement where pornography is said to be just fine, and slash fiction even feminist. Hampstead novels are so far above these one does not know where to begin — but you see they not as exciting, not dangerous, mirror a moral outlook shaped by women’s experience. Austen in her NA attributes the popularity of the gothic to a desire for excitement which is both meretricious and self-undermining (it undermines one’s reason and control).

Human nature is severely flawed — all of us — and recent trends of the powerful and influential are exploiting this for harmful effects that give them money or power.

I am sorry to intrude but what has been called domestic fiction and domestic comedy of manners for decades now is something like Barbara Pym’s books, and can be very conservative. Remember Alison Light and Nicola Humble, etc. ? This was dealing with domestic fiction that tried to pervert the genre (sometimes) to become matriarchal instead of patriarchal. It has aways been considered as a sub-genre and devaluated until recently. Some of it is awfully written as well, to be honest.

As to my blog entry, it does not deal with the sub-sub-genre of detective novel written by women but makes the link between the dreamland of a British miniseries featuring a male detective and his family in a fictive county, entirely idealised apart from the murders, and the comfort or dreamlike quality of some books from the 1930s belonging to the “domestic comedy of manners” genre I was describing before. But I argue, that these dreamlike qualities are not whole escapism as the characters have to deal with a very real background and some daily issues. What seems idyllic can cover stark reality and convey veiled criticisms if the books are not taken at their face value.

My project is to find if the same brand of literature could be found in France at the same period. The fiels is now largely covered in the UK (a bit too much and somewhat in a disorderly fashion) but nothing has been done on my side of the channel. I am working with a publisher friend about this. I’ll see what happens…

Strayed’s column was much shorter than I remembered and probably not worth the amount of postings we’ve had on it. Probably what surprised Elaine was I had an anti-pathetic response rather than a sympathetic one. My view is yes we all know how women are dismissed, degraded and whatever they are associated with, whatever kinds of novels they write are automatically partly suspect, and if it’s a genre they are felt to specialize in that will become “toss” in such writers as Nabokov. To me he is no authority.

I’ll stick by what I originally said; her purpose is to at least partly deny that women writers write primarily for other women and that’s what bothered me. In order to obtain the respect of men she offers to erase a subset of women writers and readers. The feminist movement has long had this problem of women wanting to divide themselves from other women who don’t fit the criteria men respect.

I’ll answer Elaine’s posting now — the new points she made — and Camille’s, in reverse. I liked Camille’s blog very much — enormously more meaty than Strayed’s. I like even better her posting bringing it all together from which I quote:

“I am sorry to intrude but what has been called domestic fiction and domestic comedy of manners for decades now is something like Barbara Pym’s books, and can be very conservative. Remember Alison Light and Nicola Humble, etc. ? This was dealing with domestic fiction that tried to pervert the genre (sometimes) to become matriarchal instead of patriarchal. It has aways been considered as a sub-genre and devaluated until recently. Some of it is awfully written as well, to be honest.

As to my blog entry, it does not deal with the sub-sub-genre of detective novel written by women but makes the link between the dreamland of a British miniseries featuring a male detective and his family in a fictive county, entirely idealised apart from the murders, and the comfort or dreamlike quality of some books from the 1930s belonging to the “domestic comedy of manners” genre I was describing before. But I argue, that these dreamlike qualities are not whole escapism as the characters have to deal with a very real background and some daily issues. What seems idyllic can cover stark reality and convey veiled criticisms if the books are not taken at their face value.”

There are numerous articles and books about how women use this genre in just the way Camille describes so eloquently. I disagree in the sense that Taylor and those columns Fran cited do not identify domestic fiction so negatively. This is the same problem as middle brow. I think I am doing more than single-handedly trying to reclaim a category. That would be hopeless — domestic fiction includes women who win the Orange Prize (often includes domestic fiction): and the Hampstead is almost synonymous with it, from Brideshead Revisted to Elizabeth Bowen’s masterpieces – hers are Hampstead novels. Some surely have scenes set there. Not only is the brothel Lovelace takes Clarissa to in Hampstead; he rapes her there.

In reply to Elaine, the historical novel is just as much a woman’s form as male, and it subdivides. If some or famous modern men don’t recognize them, what can I do? Some critics have and not all are women. The first historical novel — where real history is combined with imagination may be said to be by a woman: Clara Reeve, The English Baron. If you drop some male criteria which would exclude Sophia Lee, it’s arguable that The Recess was first. Women quickly used historical novels to make political statements and there is a book about women’s historical novels in the 19th century by Barbara Leah Harman: from Bronte, to Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers, to Eliot and on. I’m getting into Diana Wallace’s The Woman’s Historical Novel: one way in which it differs from men’s gives us a perspective on Mantel’s Wolf Hall: it offers a freedom to explore masculinity as a sort of social and cultural construction. I think you can read her revision of Thomas Cromwell that way. In fact historical novels are so much women’s forms, that they were almost entirely women’s at the turn of the 20th century and that made them despised for a while (as historical romance) but there has been a turn into self-reflexive historical texts (post-modern) starting in the later 1980s and nowadays such books get big prizes. There’s a great essay be Suzanne Keen on this.

It was also suggested that the point of the article was women proving they are equal to men. She mentioned where a man could not believe that Rebecca Solnit wrote a certain book because it couldn’t be by a woman.

This is a larger issue than just books – and one we did have some kind of thread or comments on a little bit earlier. My response again, why should we? and it’s useless. We are different from men. Lynn Brown, basic psychology books written in the 1970s through 90s were about this. What they were doing were arguing that the male characteristics so vaunted are awful and women’s often superior.

I hope I did not go on my recent trip to NYC to prove I’m equal to a man, and it was just as much an ordeal for me as Strayed’s time in the Wild. I thought she was trying to get away from society to give herself another perspective on the value of it — which when I go into nature often seems to me so petty and meaningless. You put the need to pay rent in its place.

Very interesting reading on subject of how “women’s novels” have been marginalized and treated with that tone of great condescension. [And I certainly agree with Ellen here — absolutely cannot see why that misogynist and anti-children Australian novel The Man Who Loved Children (he didn’t) keeps getting dragged up every decade or so.] Another interesting “take” on the Hampstead novel is this one by Tom Sykes:

The Hampstead Novel … and Its Discontents

TOM SYKES takes a look at the Hampstead novel

“So what precisely is the Hampstead novel? Although many examples of the genre are set in this plush north London suburb, many aren’t. It might be more useful then to look at the Hampstead novel as less a geo-literary definition in the sense of “Irish drama” or “Malaysian poetry” than as a more generalised movement that emerged in the 1950s to explore English bourgeois preoccupations in a realist, seriocomic style.

“These were stories of a Cambridge ingénue who falls pregnant by clip-voiced BBC newsreaders, a working-class lecturer who tries to climb the academic ladder by wooing an heiress, and a musically-talented young woman who becomes the mistress of a tycoon. They spoke to a homogenous, white, middle-class, conservative readership in an era before multiculturalism, feminism and the permissive society. Early classics include Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (1965) and Margaret Forster’s Georgy Girl (1965). More recently, authors ranging from Ian McEwan to Fay Weldon and Melvyn Bragg to Zoë Heller have been tarred with the Hampstead brush.”

On WWTTA two people have called Wild by Strayed a misplaced male narrative: I contend that it’s a mischaracterization of at least the movie, Wilderness, to characterize it as a male narrative in which we are to enjoy seeing a female come up to male standards.

Not for a moment did I see the story as a woman coming up to male standards — or having anything to do with male genres. First I remind people that Laura Dern was nominated for best supporting actress; arguably she could have been centrally the actress. After a brief setting of the plot-design — young woman going for rigorous walk through natural landscape, we move to two series of flashbacks. The second occurs so often I’ll lay a bet it takes more than 50% of the film space. This is a story about a mother and daughter:

Slowly it’s revealed as her memories come and go (flashbacks with voice-over) her single-mother was diagnosed with spinal cancer at age 45 and within a month was dead. Less time to experience the indifference of the medical establishment, but she was told she had a year. She was someone who tried hard to go through life with cheer and hope and we first see her dancing by the kitchen sink as the young child Cheryl looks on, then going to the same high school Cheryl is in; dialogues of them going into bad debt and trying to pay for their loans as waitresses; she serves her son when she should be doing her homework; moving back in time, we see her violent husband, how she fled him with her children when young and lived in a car for a time. The desperate straits of the 75% we might call this. (Movies have been reflecting the condition of a huge number of people in the US since 2004/5, three years before the financial crash.)

The whole point of the walk is to show the heroine coming to terms with her relationship with her mother and her mother’s horrible death. How is this a male narrative when featured is how the son was not there, exploited his mother’s favoritism and failed her in the end?

The first begins the narrative. Our heroine is phoning her ex-husband (we realize who he is later); she phones him periodically. He cannot – he is too decent — hang up. He has a new girlfriend but he tells her he will come and help her. He is now her only tie. We see in flashbacks that this was a marriage she fled, that he was decent and that she descended to become a drug addict and prostitute on the street.

The point of her walk is not to imitate males. It’s to rebuild a belief that she can take care of herself. The walk is a female story. It begins probably earlier than Sophie Cottin’s enormously popular Elisabeth, a walk through Siberia. Austen with her cunning picked up on that and with her cruelty to women (yes) mocked it. It is most famous in Jeannie Deans’ rescue of her sister in The Heart of Mid-lothian. The heart is an accusation of infanticide against Effie which Jeannie gets pardon for. This is on every level a mother-daughter story. They are common in women’s literature.

Scott is no feminist but he has intuitive instincts. Today a woman has been put in prison for 40 years for having a stillborn child.

Elaine may say “comme tu veux” — but this is no displaced male narrative. It is a woman rescuing herself as a woman. Oliphant has a story of a woman going for a long journey: Kirsten. She succeeds by getting herself a position as a seamtress in London, having taken her journey from Scotland (as did Oliphant herself, only she became an incessant writer, 149 books).

Had it been advertised this way – as a displaced male story — I would never have gone to the moviehouse. I never (as in Mary Crawford’ use of the term “hardly ever”) go to see action adventure films and I keep away from many male genres as ugly and authors as disguised male misogyny — often through pretenses of irony.

I care far more that women readers and writers and their favored genres are dismissed and denied than the obvious truth that continually and everywhere there is continual bias and dismissal of women’s books and judging women in everywhere. Where are women to go if we do not support one another asked Austen? She stood up for women’s genres. I want to support women who forge connections through what they read, and write. As did Austen at least in Chapter 5 of NA (it must be remembered one of her later publications, for all we know written in the last year of her life).

P.S. I will add to the discussion how disturbing it is to see young women today not just watch Games of Thrones (which one can) but buy into the mind-set of the author and film-maker who appear to find sex as violence and voyeuristic violence itself as a norm we accept. This evening Izzy was telling me of scenes that Wolf Hall’s last scene of Anne beheaded is but a thoughtful controlled evocation of: it’s just par for the course to have major characters beheaded and the “fun” is film people watching this — their reaction. Rather like if we could have filmed someone watching a mid-16th century person racked, disembowelled and quartered and then burnt. So the issues raised goes beyond feminism.